Makoto_the_Phoenix

It's a wonderful thing to get surprised with something new. I mean, I love surprises. The excitement of not knowing is better than having a ballpark several weeks in advance. That being said, that carefree side of me only shows up when it's something totally innocuous. It doesn't show up when it's really wondering about classes or grades. I'm not wrestling with grades right now or anything - I have at least a B in all of my classes - but I don't know whether or not I'll get a final exam out of my required multicultural course. Talk about a waste of life, that course... worst part is probably the literal lack of attention that my class has been getting for the last month. It's an online course so I could justify not seeing it for 2 or 3 days, but thirty-six days and counting? Get real. Anyway, I probably won't be able to post what I wanted to later since I actually have to complete the mock-up. I've got three projects to finish (in three different paradigms and four different languages, five if I count the one I'm actually writing), and I also have to study for two major class final exams. Pray for me, if you are so inclined.

Ubuntu - it's a bit easier for you to understand things with it; Fedora is a wild, wild beast.

Today, my Linux Tech Help guide has been officially sticked on the forums. This is actually really good news - I'm rather excited that it's available in a ready-to-get-to fashion, and it saves me the trouble of bringing it back from page 10 or 12 or even 27 (imagine a giant server error and the populace floods the Tech Forum - yeah, that thread would disappear in a second). This also means that the legion of 64-bit users having trouble going into HD (myself included) can find a common ground to work problems and errors out. Errors on my hit list: Sound won't wrap in Karmic, RS sometimes crashes, and of course, no HD for 64-bit systems. Looks like it's going to be really fun debugging what's going on. Not much else to say today, but I'm pretty glad that this happened. I've got to look into extending support to more distros, namely the top four distros according to Distrowatch (Fedora, Mint, and OpenSUSE - I already support Ubuntu).

I keep promising that I'll get my super-secret open-source program outlined here, and rest assured, I will this week. I just need a scanner to get some things to a digital format, first. Anyways, on to the nature of this blog's post: Three reasons each why CS is fun and frustrating. Why CS is fun: You get to do nifty projects with things that you've never tinkered with before. Who'd think that I could write my own programming language at the end of a semester?You get to look into interesting subject matters, and explore the cutting edge of software languages. Google Go is a prime example of that - check it out at www.golang.org .You can look back on your projects and say that you truly enjoyed creating them. Let me tell you, LISP was tons of fun. Writing my own lexer for this language is fun, too. Why CS is frustrating: Insomnia. Need I elaborate on this? It'll be 3AM when I post this, and I would like to wake up before 10:30AM. Yeah, that's gonna happen. Complexity of programs. Defining things so that they're nice and neat can get tedious. Especially when you're both 1) pressed for time and 2) slightly sleep depraved.Amount of extra time spent outside of class learning things. I still owe myself 144 hours of free time from last year learning the complexity of about a dozen different sorts. For those that are interested in the subject matter, be prepared to spend a lot of time working at it. And I mean working hard. Some of the things may come to you as second nature, and others may come to you as about as easy to understand as Sanskrit, but be prepared. Totally unrelated: Ubuntu One is a very effective cloud-based storage system. 2GB free and 50GB for $120/yr. I would sooner drop the cash on a portable drive (with 5 or 6 times more storage), but 2GB for free to keep my code synchronized between my tower and my laptop is quite nice. Now only if the damn thing would let me synchronize individual folders instead of being isolated to the "Ubuntu One" directory...

There is a place and time for these kinds of things. RuneScape fits neither category. If it gets under your skin, either a) report them within the rules or B) ignore them.

Sorry about the late replies, I've been preoccupied with other projects. Anyway... The aim of this rant is not to make mining easier. It's to make mining less "sucky", or make it serve it's purpose as a skill to supply smithing with ores better. Nowadays few people mine mithril/adamantite to supply smiths with ores. Most of the ores are just gotten from monster drops... :roll: OP complains about the lack of rocks/good spots because it's difficult to find a really good high level mining area near a bank/noter/chest. OP doesn't like the one rock one ore and wants multiple ores per rock. More ores per single rock = easier leveling Make more higher level rocks near bank = easier leveling I prefer: few high level rocks = difficult leveling far from bank = difficult leveling 1 ore per rock = difficult leveling We already have pickaxes that basically auto click for you until you get the ore, it' enough IMO. I suppose Meili forgot something. OP (myself) also stated the following: [ironically, it was on the first page of responses, too.] I have absolutely no intention of increasing the ease of the skill. Find me one place where I said that and I will rescind this point. I only want the rewards from Mining to increase. I said it before, and I'll gladly say it again - give me six times more Mithril and/or Adamant, and I'll gladly accept six times less experience for both. By the by, we both mined in the same era. Mining iron/coal was arduous (unless you powermined Iron, which is a major complaint of mine in general). Mining Mithril/Adamant was difficult. Mining Runite is/was an art form. You can't tell me that you wouldn't like to be able to get more ore, now would you? That's all this rant is about, not about making things easier.

Okay. You're probably not going to understand the entry title. But this will also (partly) explain where the heck I've been for the past week. LISP is a functional programming language centered around processing lists, hence, List Processing. The primary thing you work with are lists, which are structured in parenthesis. Everything is a list. So I have a cool project (which, with technical difficulties, I wasn't able to submit on time), regarding LISP - English Sentence Generation. Basically, what it does is take several lists of different types of words (nouns, pronouns, conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, etc), and builds sentences around it. Admittedly it's rough around the edges, but since it's not quite ready yet, this one I did find amusing: [26]> (GENONE) (THE FRANTIC MICE FRANTICALLY WATCH ON THE EXHAUSTED DESKS) And no, it's not set up to do that automatically. Quite frankly, it's a good spot of luck (since it's actually pseudo-randomly determined as to what value comes out of the list). If you're curious, the cardinality (the number of potential combinations of each sentence) is well over 9 billion - I'll get a real number to give you guys later, but I have a feeling it'd overflow Java longs. There's other stuff to do with LISP - namely it's used heavily in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which makes sense - it can be taught to rewrite itself (EVAL)*. If you're curious about this, look it up. ...Other stuff has happened to me this week, but it's less interesting than programming projects. Perhaps next time, I'll outline my larger, private, open-source project. Wait, those last two are an oxymoron, right? Well, we'll see, won't we? ;) *: Technically, anything that has the ability to execute code either generated or parsed on the fly can be used in A.I., but LISP is probably the best (and most venerable) for the job, anyway. Midnight edit: Break 1 [3]> (genone) (THE THREE DEVIOUS DOGS ANGELICALLY DRINK ON THE SAXOPHONES) God, I love pseudo-random number generators.

Yeah, MMG came in the other night before posting the announcement, and thanked all of us for our contributions. According to him, we overloaded their servers four times with all of our visits. Not bad, huh?

I'm trying to get in the habit of blogging once every three days or so, but a lot of stuff can happen in 72 hours. So, depending on my time, and depending on how much actually went on that week, I'll probably do a quick recap of the past week's events every Sunday. Wall of text ahead -ye be warned. RuneScape - The Decision to Remove Extreme Potions from PvP This was an old issue, but ironically it's still got a lot of steam on the RSOF. The potion update, as many of you remember, was intended to give extensive boosts and bonuses to combatants, provided that they could make these potions (since they're untradable). On update day, it seemed too good to be true - a high level update that could possibly stick around for a lot longer! I was actually happy for the new incentive to train Herblore, and I looked forward to getting 92 for Extreme Magic potions (so I could do my insane RS goal of maxing out without trimming my HP cape). I think it was less than two days before the potions were removed from all PvP. Kind of silly, really - and I debated enthusiastically and adamantly against the decision. It didn't seem right that the players that had the high Herblore potion could now no longer use them where they would be of most use. Admittedly a lot of the skillers that I've known and met do tons more PvE more than PvP, so you'd think that this decision wouldn't have affected them as much. That's really not the case - had this update stuck, I'd have probably gotten into the [PvP] fray myself, and had some fun while doing it. It took Jagex around 48-72 hours to revert the changes, and over two weeks to come up with more player feedback about what to do with the potions. I'm not being mean towards Jagex or anything, but what kind of feedback could've been collected in 2 or 3 days that couldn't have been in 14-17 days? The disconnect there kind of seemed very, very odd to me. Then the announcement came last Tuesday that they would not be placed into PvP, due to the nature of the combat system and how it unbalanced combat in favor of those with the potions. I can respect that Jagex wants to strike balance in their combat system, but I haven't been in a PvP fight which would be considered to be 'fair' - pures, hybrids, PJers, all manners of things - put me, as a moderately high level (let's say 97 before Pest Control) at a gross disadvantage against someone with 99 Strength. Ironically, I can live with the decision. It's one that I can see now in hindsight that was the right decision. I was ranting and fuming and all manners of other things at their decision to remove them at first, but it's probably for the best - the potions highlighted key flaws within the combat system, and I hope these flaws are addressed very, very soon. What I can't live with are the people who are hellbent on complaining/demanding the potions back into PvP situations. It's probably better for us to move on than it is to sit here and whine about how we would have preferred things. The place to start would be to suggest potions that can be used in PvP that don't unbalance the triangle the same way these potions did. ------ Windows 7 and Ubuntu Karmic - A Weekend with Both I finally got around to redoing my tower and laptop this weekend; the tower has always been a Windows/Linux dual-boot system (due to academic requirements), and the laptop has always been a pure Linux system. So, this past Friday, I had made the decision to perform the backups necessary and prepare my machines for the wipe and reinstall. Would you believe me if I told you I had forgotten I had 125GB worth of data I wanted to move back and forth on a 100Mb line? I did. And the back-up part took about twelve hours. First, I had installed Windows 7 on my machine, to avoid any messes with GRUB and Ubuntu Karmic later on. It had taken about an hour for the install (not just figuring out how it would work), and it had done partitioning in a way that I didn't want it to - 3 primary partitions, one of which was infuriating - a 100MB boot partition. C'mon now... Second, I must say again that I am impressed with what I've got with this 64-bit system so far. It seems to be solid and responsive, and I like it. My only hope is that it runs the programs I have to run. Ubuntu Karmic wasn't a nightmare, but it was frustrating not being able to set up the partitions the way I wanted to. I got around that limitation (extended partitioning), and things have been going smoothly since. It didn't take long for it to install (about 45 minutes), and when it came back up, things worked fine. Just a word of caution for those that are Linux enthusiasts - get an NVIDIA card. Your life will be so much more pleasant. Take it from me, a guy that didn't get an NVIDIA card. But will when he gets the cash for it. Overall I'm pleased with Karmic as well, but the one thing is that Java sound won't wrap around PulseAudio anymore, which is to say "padsp firefox" no longer works. I'll figure a workaround for that later, but it hasn't been as gruesome as it was in the past - if I close Firefox/Prism/Google Chrome entirely, then I get my sound card back. I'll report more on these two things as I go along. ------ Five-Day Weekend A freak snowstorm hit Denver on Wednesday, and it turned from a nice, pleasant day to a white-out. I was contemplating actually going in for classes on Wednesday, but I had received an email prior from one of my professors saying that the 7PM class was cancelled, and the latest one from another saying the campus was closed at 1PM. My campus happened to be closed for both Wednesday and Thursday, and that put me behind in not only the amount of time spent on the job (I lost $20 from that storm), but in the amount of homework/classwork we'll need to do. Anyway, on this weekend, I actually knew I had more time than normal - typically I do more work than play on any given Wednesday - but here I was, digging out a RS Membership card I had bought two weeks back, and I was playing RS again. I'm glad I could sit down and unwind with a few games - I hadn't done this for ages. Now the weekend's over, and I have to go back in tomorrow. It sure was relaxing while it lasted. I didn't get much done, as far as classwork is concerned, but I'm not worried about it - my LISP project isn't due until Saturday, and I'm sure that my math professor will give us an extension for the Mathematica work we have to finish.

I thought for sure that Woodcutting would be at least #5.

In theory, a 64-bit processor can address up to 2^64 bytes of memory; we don't bother taking into account the flip bit at the end of the word (we're not dealing with an integer - we're dealing with addresses). Anyway, I've installed Windows 7 x64 on my tower, and it runs smoothly. Albeit, I haven't tinkered with it 100%, but I will be in the coming weeks. You'll hear about my complaints experiences with the OS soon. :P

I heard about this hint in MMG's chat the other day, and as I was leaving for a dinner party, I thought to myself - Who said that the b was a word in English? Could be another language, possibly Dutch, since that's (very likely) the next language RuneScape could be translated in. Sadly my Dutch is abysmal, so I can't elaborate further on my hypothesis. Even so, it's probably not any word that we'd recognize, anyway - just wait for the skill to come out, and then we'll know what it is.

Ubuntu 9.10 works swimmingly well with my laptop, which luckily has an NVIDIA card in it. Not much can be said about my tower though, since a- It's still got 3 hours to back up 125GB of data to my laptop (100MB line, heh) and b- When I ran it with the LiveCD, FGLRX was just an unhappy camper. I made remarks about the new OS on my blog, and I think I'll follow it up a bit. But overall I am pleased.

What is the sense of letting those that want the easy way out have their way? All this would do is create the same problem, except now that it's OKed by Jagex, and players like me, who actually play the game and get their items that way, would probably leave in droves.

Since you said you knew... Carl said it better than I could. Kudos. RWT is a problem that may never go away, but if you look back, the whole point wasn't to completely stomp out RWT - it was to make substantially less practical. For those cheats that still exist out there, it's actually a lot less practical for them to go around and move gold from one account to another. Look back to the old days, the days of so-called "free trade". When it was unregulated, RWT was actually very, very easy to accomplish. Now, with trade limits, pins, no-dropped items in the Wilderness/PvP worlds, and gravestones, it's actually ten times harder to conceivably RWT. The only way it happens now is if someone trades their account to a gold-seller, and lets them power-level/power-farm/power-whatever, and 9 times out of 10, the average RS player wouldn't give their password/pin out to someone. The final nail in the coffin, I'd say, is the Jagex Security Keychain - if it goes through (which I hope it does), this would make social engineering and account trading virtually impossible, save for the occasion that someone could lose the device, have the device stolen, etc. Either way, it's one more barrier in between a would-be gold farmer. I'd say that the fight against RWT has helped a lot of us with our game. Admittedly, things will never be the same before the GE and the limits landed, but we can either get used to this, or accept that a RWT-infested game would mean that RS wouldn't have made it this far. [besides, I don't want to play in a game with cheaters. That kind of player shouldn't even be allowed to touch a computer.]

It'll probably take me all day to back up my data on my tower. I can upgrade my laptop to Karmic anytime. I'll probably do so a bit later. I was pleased and impressed with the Release Candidate, so I'm looking forward to a solid OS for the next six to twelve months. :)

The question then becomes, what can we do to differentiate it from those other forms of safe PvP. I think reward tokens on drop would be a nice idea.

I may have never PKed, but I did enjoy safe PvP. In effect I would definitely agree with this suggestion. The only reason that there would be animosity to this is that the current PKers out there are used to fighting for items and glory, and the new system might freak them out. But this would be a good idea anyway. Would it be something that allowed you to earn points to earn special items, such as Brawlers and PvP World Gear? That'd be pretty awesome.

Another autumn, another round of operating systems. For those that are in the Linux loop, we're used to getting the full onslaught here - Ubuntu 9.10 and OpenSuSE are due by the end of this week, whereas Fedora and Linux Mint are anticipated sometime in November. There's a lot of promising stuff coming down the pipeline, and it seems like it's going to definitely be a good release refresh - new X Server, new previews of GNOME Shell (which I happen to like), new kernel, and more stability than ever before. My distribution of choice is Ubuntu, and I plan to be moving my machines to 64-bit operating systems soon. Admittedly, there may seem like there aren't many more advantages than being able to address 264-1-1 bytes of memory, but I've actually felt that the system was more stable than in 32-bit. Not to mention, we should be moving to a 64-bit architecture soon - it's probably going to happen well before the end of 2020. I've been running Ubuntu 9.10 RC for about a week now, and for what it's worth, it's rock solid. For the first time in about a year, I don't have to compile my own drivers for wireless anymore. Graphics card works nice, too. I'm still a bit upset with the new Java plugin, since it doesn't seem to like working with RuneScape without eventually crashing. I'll have to file bug reports about it later. Even if RuneScape still won't go into full HD mode in 64-bit, that's kind of irrelevant right now. Jagex just needs to get their act together and ship 64-bit ELFs for Linux, that's all. Same thing applies to any other application out there - if your software won't work with 64-bit systems, then you're already way behind the curve. How many years has it been since AMD launched 64-bit instructions again?... Also, about a week back, Windows 7 was released. Alright, I know that many people don't like Vista, and Microsoft has probably lost some of its personal customers with Vista's poor showing forever (myself included), but let's be fair and give the demons company another try. I happen to be in the Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance (MSDNAA), and as a student, I am privy to receiving Windows 7 (and Vista and Win XP SP3) for $0. Even if I don't like the company much, academia relies more on Windows than one would like to believe, so I have no choice but to use it. I am a bit wary of any new OS, even the Linux OSes, but I will say that I am impressed with Windows 7 so far. I haven't done a full install of it on my main machine yet, only tinkered with it in VirtualBox, but I am indeed pleased with it. And it's not often that I'm pleased enough with Windows to consider wiping XP again for it. Anyway, I'm going to probably play with Karmic a bit more, and wait until I'm ready to back up 125GB worth of data to redo my tower. Perhaps next time I'll post something I've been working on in my spare time.

Yeah - ironically enough, most of us in the class were likening this puzzle to Minesweeper. I was never very good at it, anyway...

Wouldn't have expected someone in MMG's chat to have found it, but that's cool anyway - even so, someone would've eventually found it and posted it someplace. :P They expected people to find it because its a decoy. *Fluffy: DECOY!!!!!!!!* What're they distracting us from?

Well that's interesting. It seems that the "fake" interface floating around here just got a lot more credibility. It'll probably be one of the best updates this year; I've always been curious as to how long I've played. Nice find, Carl. :D

It's definitely fun to do. I'm learning so much more about theory than programming, which is enjoyable anyway - there's no sense in learning C if all you're trying to do is rewrite Bubble Sort. :D If you're interested in it, look into a specific paradigm of it - this being information systems, programming, data analysis, computational theory, or networking. CS is more or less a blanket term, but it has a nice mix of theory and actual programming.

It's been a long, long two weeks. Right now, I'm halfway through my Principles of Programming Languages class, and one of the assignments involves writing a Tentaizu puzzle solver. For those that are unfamiliar with it, Tentaizu (Celestial Map) is a numbers' game with a 7 by 7 grid of numbers dotted around it, and the objective is to fill the map with ten stars that satisfy the rules of its boundary. For instance, a number 0 denotes that 0 stars are allowed in the eight or so squares around it, and so on. This sounds like a moderately difficult project, right? I mean, put in about two-hundred lines of Java and it's a cakewalk, right? Well, here's the kicker. Since we're learning about different paradigms, we have to write the entire puzzle in Prolog. For those of you that have never heard of it, Prolog is a unique, logic-based language, in which you simply tell it what is true about your world. It has a lot to do with First Order Predicate Calculus. For logicians, this language is ideal. For those of us used to C, C++, Python, Java, and pretty much every other object-oriented/procedural language, this language will eat you alive. Simply the way you have to think about problems has to change, since you can no longer rely on an algorithm to solve problems. In summation, I was able to make some strong headway as far as getting the thing to work, but it doesn't look like it will work properly. I can't tell it what's true about Tentaizu that makes any canonical sense to myself or Prolog - I had a plan to set up boundaries, in which if it ran into a 'border', it would ignore it, but otherwise, look to find all valid places to place a star within it. Getting the border to work properly took the better part of a 3 day weekend; getting a single predicate (that's what they call statements of fact - predicates) to work to reflect that is still painful. I've come a long, long way with my Prolog, but I'll be honest - if the assignment is something you genuinely can't understand, and the professor didn't go over it as well as you'd have enjoyed, then what else can you do? I've asked most everyone in my class to lend me a hand, and I've given what advice I could on the project, but the fact of the matter is that I did my best, and I can't solve it. There are two or three others in the class that could do Prolog, and they offered me their source, but since I'm more concerned with concepts than code, I declined for two weeks. It does me no good to have the answers without any foundation. I'm the kind of guy that doesn't like to quit or give up, so I'm going to still keep at it. I'll learn Prolog here and there, and figure out how it's done. So anyway, that's that, I suppose. I think I might try to unwind and tinker a bit with Ubuntu Karmic.

Here's what I walked away with from that interview: [spoiler=Click here] I wholeheartedly believe that this interview was made to make the clan look good, and on top of that, it gives them more free advertisement (everywhere it was posted). It's kind of disheartening that this kind of gamestyle could be thought to be legitimate, and I'll give you two reasons why. 1) Power of Clan Manipulation. If I really have to spell this out, it will involve a $800 dictionary set flying at your head. 2) The fact that he doesn't play the actual game as often is pretty much a slap to the face of everyone that earns their gear here. I mean, I understand that it's a game and all, and that we shouldn't overreact to these kinds of things, but I have to actually do a lot more actual playing of the game to make 5% of what he claims his worth to be. That really doesn't make it seem fair to the players that actually play the game. There's probably a billion ways to decompose my reasoning, but I still don't like the idea of merchanting clans. Sorry. [EDIT] Okay, I know you're upset, but don't go spouting nonsense. Merchants and merchanting clans existed long before the GE, and in my own opinion, their effects could be felt a lot tighter than what's going on now (World 2, merchants that refused to sell to you for eight hours, just plain annoying). Neither removing trade limits nor the GE would alleviate the problem. Nor would banning the clans themselves - nothing's stopping them from operating underground. Something's gotta be done about them, though.